As I am continuing my journey in audio I have got myself into the art of audio post-production, specifically into game and animation audio. In that discipline of audio, the sound designer / editor has to work with numerous sound files. Best practice tells, to treat your audio library as a large database, which makes much easier and quicker to find a specific type of sound.

As I am just starting to build my own sound library, I was wanting to come up with a simple system which can be adapted easily if it needs to be, later in the future. The system is widely used in similar form by established sound designers, which gives some assurance that it is actually useable – I do not necessarily want to reinvent the wheel here. *(not to mention, using wheels in database handling might would be strange)

This is an example of the naming convention I am using:

FILENAME	Foley-Footsteps-Grass-HeavyRun-Syn01
Category	Foley-Footsteps-Grass-HeavyRun-Syn01
Sub-category	Foley-Footsteps-Grass-HeavyRun-Syn01
Descriptor One	Foley-Footsteps-Grass-HeavyRun-Syn01
Descriptor Two	Foley-Footsteps-Grass-HeavyRun-Syn01
Clip Type/Number	Foley-Footsteps-Grass-HeavyRun-Syn01

Main Categories: Describing the main type of the sound, referring to (but not excursively) to the recording (sound design) technique.

Examples of main category names:
Foley, SFX, music, vocals, ambience

Sub-categories: Groups of sounds which fall under similar generic description referring to the action what the sound is associated with.

Examples of sub-category names:
steps, doors, electrical glitches, rain, thunder, gunshot, typing

Descriptor One: Describing the environment where the sound takes place

Examples of Descriptor One names:
grass, sand, snow, paddles, floor material

Descriptor two: Describing the nature or the intensity of the sound

Examples of Descriptor Two names:
heavy, light, soft, quiet, fast, slow

Clip type & number: Referring to the individual file name & version number.

Examples of Clip type & numbers:
dry01, syn02, wet05